The crushing Greek debt could be canceled the way it was made – by sleight of hand. But saving the Greek people and their economy is evidently not in the game plan of the Eurocrats. – Ellen Brown
Ellen Brown – Greece’s creditors have finally brought the country to its knees, forcing President Alexis Tsipras to agree to austerity and privatization measures more severe than those overwhelmingly rejected by popular vote a week earlier. No write-down of Greece’s debt was included in the deal, although the IMF has warned that the current debt is unsustainable.
Former Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis calls the deal “a new Versailles Treaty” and “the politics of humiliation.” Greek defense minister Panos Kammenos calls it a “coup d’état” done by “blackmailing the Greek prime minister with collapse of the banks and a complete haircut on deposits.”
“Blackmail” is not too strong a word. The European Central Bank has turned off its liquidity tap for Greece’s banks, something all banks need, as explained earlier here. All banks are technically insolvent, lending money they don’t have. They don’t lend their deposits but create deposits when they make loans, as the Bank of England recently confirmed. When the depositors and borrowers come for their money at the same time, the bank must borrow from other banks; and if that liquidity runs dry, the bank turns to the central bank, the lender of last resort empowered to create money at will. Without the central bank’s backstop, banks must steal from their depositors with “haircuts” or they will collapse.
What did Greece do to deserve this coup d’état? According to former World Bank economist Peter Koenig:
[T]he Greek people, the citizens of a sovereign country . . . have had the audacity to democratically elect a socialist government. Now they have to suffer. They do not conform to the self-imposed rules of the neoliberal empire of unrestricted globalized privatization of public services and public properties from which the elite is maximizing profits – for themselves, of course. It is outright theft of public property.
According to a July 5th article titled “Greece – The One Biggest Lie You’re Being Told By The Media,” the country did not fail on its own. It was made to fail:
[T]he banks wrecked the Greek government, and then deliberately pushed it into unsustainable debt . . . while revenue-generating public assets were sold off to oligarchs and international corporations.
A Truth Committee convened by the Greek parliament reported in June that a major portion of the country’s €320 billion debt is “illegal, illegitimate and odious” and should not be paid. Continue reading
Michael Noonan – All the world is indeed a stage, and what is unfolding is a worsening tragicomedy, and it is under the direction of the elites through their debt enslavement [un]known by the world as fiat currency. The unelected “officials” in the EU are the equivalent of Keystone Kops. In fact, that is also true even of elected officials. They are all a bunch of clowns in charge of the circus called government.
The EU is on the verge of splitting. The summit (of the EU heads of state on Tuesday, July 7, 2015) laid the fault lines brutally frank: the southern Europeans want something else than the North or the East. Greece is the catalyst for a centrifugal dynamics. Amidst all this Angela Merkel: Tired, exhausted, overwhelmed. She can only watch how it is falling apart, what was supposed to be forced into a union with the temptation of money.
Greg Hunter – Financial commentator and trader Karl Denninger says what is going on in the Greek debt crisis is really a global problem. Denninger explains, “All of these countries have engaged in the same lie. They have all engaged in the same fundamental fraud, which is you can spend more than you take in on a permanent basis. It is the same fraud that is going on here in the United States. We just haven’t gotten hammered with it –yet, but we will. This is a fraud. The people who did this need to go to prison. There is no way to undo that Gordian knot, other than to say we can’t pay it. We never could pay it. You were lied to, and by the way, the people who participated in the lending were active participants in a crime.”
Charles Hugh Smith – Beneath the endless twists and turns of Greece’s debt crisis lie fundamental asymmetries that doom the euro, the joint currency that has been the centerpiece of European unity since its introduction in 1999.